A Day at the Beach (Part 1)
by VATERGrrl
"Eeee-yewww!" Cory Marshall drew out the exclamation of disgust as long as he could, pinching his nose closed for good measure. He grimaced at the sudden stench that had invaded the car, then looked over at his friend, who was apparently oblivious to the smell.
"Doctor Stevens, can you open a window? Tom just farted."
"I did dot!" Tom Wyman crossed his arms defensively over his chest and grimaced right back. He couldn't smell a thing, thanks to lingering congestion from a summer cold, but he wasn't about to admit that.
"Did so!"
"Did dot!"
"Guys, guys." Jed Stevens, both hands firmly on the wheel of his Volvo wagon, hoped that the two ten year olds in the back seat couldn't see his expression in the rear view mirror, and fought to control the smile on his face just in case they could. "What you're smelling, Cory, is the heavenly `aroma of Tacoma'."
"But we're still in Fife." Cory had just spotted the green and white sign on the right side of the road a few minutes ago, and doubted that they were already in the second largest city in Western Washington.
"Good point." Jed's gaze flicked briefly to the rear view mirror, to determine if there were any cars to his immediate left, then signaled to get around a particularly slow car ahead of them. "But that smell --"
"Farts." Cory supplied, prompting Tom to snicker.
"Ah, well, yes, I suppose you could say that it does smell a little bit like that, sure." Jed cleared his throat, looked again in the mirror and then signaled before drifting back into the right lane. "But what you're actually smelling is the pulp mills. That odor has been associated with Tacoma, but there are also a lot of pulp mills in Fife. And the smell carries."
"Yeah," Tom chimed in. "Lige fards."
"Thomas Andrew..." Jed growled, but inwardly he was pleased that his son was piping up with his regular rude humor.
"Whud? You always told be there's dothig wrog with bodily fugshuds."
"In small doses. Anyway, what's the first thing you two want to do when we get to Fox Island?"
"Swib over to BicDeel Eyelud ad see the prisoders." Tom named the state penitentiary for men, McNeil Island, which was just visible across the Puget Sound from the beachfront property his father had inherited. "They'll arrest you," Cory said sensibly.
"Dough, they woad. I cad swib udderwadder."
"For two miles?"
"Id's dot thad far." Tom coughed, hoping it sounded dismissive. In reality, his throat was raw and irritated by the congestion that was still clogging his nose and forcing him to breathe through his mouth. However, he would rather pull out all of his nose hairs, followed by his eyebrows, with a pair of pliers rather than ask his father for a Kleenex.
"Doctor Steveds? Cad you had be a tissue, please?" Cory, whose voice had been perfectly clear only seconds ago, sniffed dramatically, and he raised cupped hands near his face to sneeze into them. "Heh-eshoo! Eshooo! Ehhh-shhh!" He sniffed again, appeared to flick tears out of the corners of his eyes. "I think I'm coming down with something."
"But I thoughd you were -- ow!" Tom's retort was silenced by a quick and solid jab of Cory's finger into his ribcage.
"Here you go, Cory." Jed distractedly lifted the Kleenex box from the passenger seat beside him and awkwardly twisted his arm backward to offer the tissues.
"Thanks, Doctor Stevens." Cory accepted the box with both hands, placing it deliberately in the space on the bench seat between himself and Tom.
Tom didn't believe that sneezing was contagious, not in the way that one kid in his classroom could yawn, and then a moment later, two more would crack their mouths open, and before you knew it, the room was awash in yawning. However, not more than a minute after Cory's "fit" had stopped, Tom found himself ripping tissue after tissue from the box and stacking them haphazardly as a barrier between his palms and the potentially messy sneeze he could feel building.
"Ihh... huh-ggghh..." He fought against the impulse to sneeze for as long as he could, partly because it embarrassed him, but also because he didn't want his father to hear and then go off the deep end, locking him in the beach house and forbidding him to swim, sail, or even walk around the island. Finally, however, the pressure and itch grew beyond his control, and he jerked forward toward the back of the passenger seat in front of him. "Huh-chhhggggkk!"
"Bless you." His father's comment was emotionless and habitual, for which Tom was grateful. He rearranged the tissues he held, creating a new, dry surface, and lifted the bundle closer to his nose.
"Ah-ch-hooo!" The second sneeze was quicker to come, tumbling out with less effort and, thankfully, less mess. Tom dabbed quickly and discretely under his nose, a little afraid of finding that his nose had started bleeding again, but his caution was unnecessary. The clutch of tissues he held came away damp, but not bright red. Cory, who had fixed his attention to the scenery passing by, looked over at his friend, then leered. "Gross, you have snot coming out." He pulled a tissue from the box and handed it over.
"Eeee-yewww!" Tom mocked his friend's earlier tone of indigation, but swiped under his nose again, then hunched over toward the right side door to gain enough privacy to blow, long and loud, into the tissues.
"You okay back there?" The noise finally gained his father's attention, and when Tom looked up, he could see his father glancing into the rear view mirror, trying to assess the situation while maintaining safe control of the car.
"Daaaad, I'm fine. Jeez. It's not like I'm dying or something."
The unthinking comment took both father and son by surprise, and Cory did his best to glance causally back out his window, pretending he hadn't hear it at all.
"Maybe we'll find a kelp bulb on the beach, or something. You know," Cory rambled on, filing the quiet space with chatter, "Mr. Andreesen -- that's our band teacher at school," he added for Jed's benefit, "he got his eye put out with one of those. Or, maybe it was the other end -- I don't see how a bulb could be pointy."
"I always thought he got his eye zapped out by those awful ties he wears." Tom eagerly accepted the change in topic, willing to be gruesome as long as it wasn't directed at himself. Mr. Andreesen's glass eye, which always seemed to be looking off toward something that didn't exist, was the subject of quite a bit of gossip by the elementary school band members, and even Mr. A himself wasn't above joking around about it.
"That's not very nice, guys. Maybe he wouldn't want you to joke about his disability."
"It's okay, Doctor Stevens. He even tells a few jokes himself, about how he's color blind and needs to wear ties that he can see in the dark."
"Ah. Well, I suppose it's fine, then." Jed pointed up at the top of the windshield. "See those towers, guys? We're about to go over the Tacoma Narrow's Bridge, one of the longest and best suspension bridges in the world. Do either of you know why it's called `Galloping Gertie'?"
Tom had watched the filmstrip of the bridge collapse over and over again in the library, running it forward and then backward. He thought it was especially funny to see the car fly back up from the water and land on a miraculously whole span of bridge.
"It was something to do with the way it moved, right? In really high winds?" Cory looked out his window, rolled it down for a better view and stuck his head out as far as his seat belt would allow.
"Exactly right, Cory. The bridge deck, as it was originally designed, had the unfortunate habit of twisting and bucking at certain wind velocities. Mostly, it just undulated -- went up and down, like a roller coaster track -- but when the winds hit 42 miles an hour, it started twisting, and the bridge wasn't designed for that kind of motion."
"And then it fell apart, right? Some guy had to run for his life?" Tom pointed to the high drama of the event.
"Yes, and as I recall, his dog got out of the car safely, too." Jed wasn't sure, exactly, but he didn't want to bring up the possibility of death again. Better to fudge the truth a bit and end the story on a happy note. "The engineers figured out how to rebuild it to decrease the possibility of torsion -- that's the twisting motion -- and it's been perfectly safe for the past thirty-some years."
"So, it doesn't `gallop' anymore, does it, Dad?" Tom rubbed the back of his hand against his nose, sniffled.
"Nope. And at the time -- during the year or so between its opening and its collapse -- people were actually attracted to it for that very feature: some folks thought it was like a big carnival ride."
"That's du-uhshooo! That's dub. Snff!" Feeling another sneeze dogging him, Tom groped for more tissues, but had only stripped out two and pressed them against his nose before his watering eyes squeezed themselves shut. "Huh-shooo!" He felt a fine spray touch his hands and grimaced, lifting up the tissues to reveal a distinct, tatter-edged hole in the middle of them. "Uck."
Cory took one look at the hole, sunlight streaming magnificently through it to highlight the raggedy edges, and began to laugh.
"Id's dod f -- hishhh! Fuddy." Tom mustered as much haughty indignation as he could, given his congested voice and the remnants of facial tissue he still held.
"Nope," his friend demurred, then snorted out another laugh. "You're right, not funny."
Tom sniffled, resisted the urge to rub his hands on the legs of his jeans and pulled more tissues out of the box, sandwiching them between his hands to dry off his palms. As he balled up the used tissues, he couldn't help the small jump of the left side of his mouth, a brief quirk that became a genuine smile. "Well, baybe id's a little fuddy."
The pair began laughing, quietly at first, then eventually raucously enough for Jed to question their sanity. By the time they'd quieted, Jed was pulling into the driveway at the end of Brick Kiln Road, right next to the red cedar-shingled, one-story beach house that had served as a winter retreat and a summer vacation oasis for as long as Tom had been alive.
"Okay, guys, let me open up the house, and you can get changed into your swim trunks." Jed's words were superfluous: even before the car came to a complete stop, Tom and Cory were opening their doors and tumbling out onto the gravel, lugging their backpacks behind them and racing each other over the long, worn lines of driftwood in front of the house down to the edge of Puget Sound. They yelped as the cool water washed up over the canvas toes of their shoes, ran briefly toward the safety of the house, then shrugged and galloped back to the tide line, repeating the process twice more before dashing up to the porch where Jed was fumbling with his key chain.
"C'bod, Dad. We're goig to biss the best part of the day. Hurry up!" Tom was bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet, restless in his excitement. Cory was almost as unrestrained, but refrained from bobbing like a cork on the ocean as he stood with his back to the door.
"Okay, got it." Jed pushed open the door, and as the two boys he chaperoned ran in, a whoosh of musty air came back out. The cabin hadn't been used at all earlier in the summer, due in part to Jed's ever-increasing work schedule and compounded by cooler-than-average weather in June and the first few weeks of July. As a result, he was sure that a fine layer of dust had settled on every horizontal surface, and he grimaced at the inevitable result of two ten-year olds let loose in the environment.
Cory, who had already kicked off his sneakers and was peeling down his jeans to reveal the dark red swim trunks he wore underneath, paused in his doubled-over position, his forehead almost touching his knees. He sniffled, grimaced, then pushed the side of his left hand up under his nose, letting loose a sharp, loud "ch-haaa!"
"Bless you. I knew I should have aired the place out." Jed moved immediately to open a window, the first one he could get to at the front of the house, but didn't open a second for fear that cross-ventilation would only further stir up the dust and aggravate his patient's symptoms.
"Thad's ohh- heshhh! Okay, Dogder Steveds." Cory fumbled at the back pocket of his jeans, the waist of which was pushed down to his ankles, hopping on his right foot in order to free his left leg and pull up the waistband. "Id haaa-ash-hooo! Happeds."
Watching the tow-headed boy still struggling to get out of his jeans and, he assumed, take a bandanna from one of the pockets, Jed wavered for an instant between letting Cory continue to wrestle and assuming his standard good-doctor role. The former seemed cruel, as the kid's blue eyes were watering with allergic tears and his nose had started running, but the latter risked embarrassing both Cory and Tom. That weekend, he wanted to be almost invisible, a jovial but restrained parent who was more of a big brother than a dad, and avoid any appearance of controlling or limiting his son's behavior.
Jed's indecision was relieved a moment later when Tom, who had also put on his swim trunks under his pants, padded over to his friend and went to one bare knee on the floor before him, prying out an already-crumpled blue bandanna from the right back pocket of Cory's jeans and handing it up to his friend.
"Here." Tom waited until Cory had wadded the cloth up around his nose and released a quick spate of five sneezes, small "chhh" noises that didn't seem to be preceded by an audible intake of breath, they were so close together. Then he hooked a light, careful arm around his friend's shoulders to guide him toward the front porch and the cleansing, slightly tangy air coming off from the Sound, pausing every few steps when Cory indicated he was going to sneeze again.
Jed watched in silence as his son, the rough-and-tumble kid who had never in his life indicated any desire to follow his father into medicine and seemed destined instead for a life in sarcastic stand-up comedy, unconsciously and yet expertly emulated the precise movements Jed himself would have taken, helping Cory out of the dusty main room and out into the fresh air. He was rather glad that he was standing far behind the heads of both boys, and that Cory's sneezing, muffled and dwindling as it was, covered the sound of his loud swallow and throat clearing.
"Better?" When he wandered out two minutes later, Cory was rubbing at his upper lip with a corner of the cloth, sniffling lightly and preparing to wad the bandanna up around his nose so he could blow into it. The boy paused when he heard the question, sniffled again.
"Yeb, a lod." He blinked still-watering blue eyes, focusing his glance away from both Jed and Tom as he blew his nose, rubbed briefly again at his upper lip, then sneezed again, unexpectedly. "Sorry."
"No need to be." Jed shrugged off the apology. "Listen, you two, go off and have fun. I'll be around here if you need me -- lots of work to get caught up on." He didn't want to admit that he'd be poring through medical journals, including Pediatrics, JAMA, and, the most ominously named, Cancer. The last one, he'd make sure to read only furtively, once both boys had turned in for the night. He didn't plan on hiding the truth from his son forever, only until the diagnosis he feared was confirmed with a bone marrow aspiration and more blood tests. But for that weekend, he wanted Tom to have a chance at being a kid -- a normal, active, healthy kid. God knew that after Monday's admission to Children's...
"Just, uhm, be back before it gets dark, will you? I don't want to have to go tromp all over the island, looking for you."
"Okay, Dad." A dismissive, near-to-eye-rolling tone had crept back into Tom's voice, and he stood up before his father could attempt to ruffle his hair, or, ick of icks, hug him. "Last one to Purdy eats a jelly fish!" He scampered off the porch and over the naturally-occurring driftwood bulkhead that provided a small buffer between the edge of the patio and the beach beyond.
Cory rose slightly more slowly, unsure whether to leave his bandanna on the porch step or ask Doctor Stevens to hold onto it for him.
"Here, I'll put that back with your pack. You can always come back for it if you need it." Jed extended a hand for the cloth, and curled his fingers gingerly around it. "Go, have fun. And, ah, Cory?"
Cory's toes were just touching the smooth rocks beyond the edge of the patio when he skidded to as stop. "Yeah?"
"Keep an eye out for Tom, will you?" Jed hoped he wouldn't sound like an idiot, or send alarm bells going off in Cory's head over the real state of Tom's health. He needn't have worried, however, as Cory simply shrugged, nodded.
"Sure thing, Doctor Stevens." He grinned, then ran down the pebbled beach to bound into the water, where his best friend already waited.
Jed breathed a sigh of relief as he heard the two boys shrieking and splashing, then trudged back into the cabin to grab his briefcase and start on the "work" that he wished he didn't have to do.